Connecting a Producer and a Consumer Using a Unix Pipe

There is a great trick to connect two processes together using the shell (hint: using pipes) that I’m going to talk about next time

If you need to connect a single producer to a single consumer, you can easily connect them using a unix pipe without changing much of the underlying code. The trick is to write to STDOUT whenever work is available for the consumer. The consumer reads work requests from STDIN.

Script Preamble

The preamble will be mostly common to both the producer and the consumer. I set STDOUT to autoflush to avoid any slowness due to buffering.